


Out Beyond Ourselves

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post Turian Ark Missions, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-21 02:58:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11348442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: Avitus Rix learns to avoid silence.





	Out Beyond Ourselves

**Author's Note:**

> I've been sketching out thoughts about AI in Andromeda. Here's one of them.

Remember when silence was a game? It would frighten you now. Silence is the failure of crucial organs. Life support offline. The patient is unresponsive. Dead before the pod could be opened. How many have you found like that now? And it's visceral every time, the scrape of the hatch against your frantic claws, the violent jolt up your arm when you punched it, furious and terrified—every pod you find with no life sign is you. 

At least it isn't him, you used to think, every time.

Silence. Silence. Silence.

On Palaven when a storm spun over the compact homes of your town they would shut the generators off, sometimes, to prevent overloads. You lay in the dark and in the moment when the heart of the storm expanded around you the silence was a world of imagined possibilities. It'll blow us all away this time! Houses pulled up by the roots, spiralling in disorder up, up through the storm into a military-regimented stratosphere - not a scary thought, for a little shithead of a kid. For you. Then. 

You loved to be swept away. Silence was breathless, but a waiting breathlessness, not a dying one. Saren swept you away pretty well, didn't he—then Macen—remember the moment of startled silence when Macen got the training baton out of your hand that first time, right before you slammed him back into the wall, the force rattling both of you--Macen's laugh rattling in his throat when you did it, everything about him slipping back into motion all at once—your claws against the softer skin of his throat, the way he gasped at that—shit. Fuck. Forehead to forehead. Macen's hand dragging across your hip. 

Why think about that now?

They put you in isolation tanks a couple of times. It can be pretty good for torture, obviously—if you keep at it long enough. Good for therapy, apparently, for some people. For you it was training three times and a shot at torture twice, but you're fucking stubborn, aren't you? They got pissy before they broke you, ruined it all by themselves. Those were days. Some kind of days. The old days—good? No idea. 

The last silence you remember is on the Natanus, when Ryder's lips moved and his words slid off the defensive barrier your mind had thrown up around itself. No—you couldn't let it in—not words and not the static warped buzz of the SAM node and not the heavy beat of your heart—though you could feel that last traitor, the pulse of it violent in your hands. 

Later there was a medbay cot. The even hum of a finely-tuned ship. The hiss and click of the doors as people came and went. The Asari doctor's footsteps. back and forth. are you ready?

Never. Always.

Yes.

Do not worry, SAM said in your mind. He's with you now. Here. He left this for you.

You stand at the node. The regular shift of SAM's processing, both of you looking like you haven't been through hell, the same tearing trauma, the same messed up premature loss. Just a Pathfinder going through material with his AI.

A flash and shimmer of ideas. Words. Your own face, your relaxed eyes - weird, did you really ever look like that?

He thought about you like that often, SAM said. He wanted you to know it.

No silence since then. As torture silence didn't really get you before, but yeah, it'd wreck you now. Wake in your bed in the near-silent hours and feel like you can't open the pod. Wake in your bed and feel the space where Macen's damn snoring should be. 

It's a weird setup—having an AI monitor you in those useless dark hours where quiet tries to transform itself into the other thing. But hey - if it works, right? If it means music is playing before you've woken up enough to start thinking you're on the burning wreck of the ark, that's not bad. SAM's always there anyway. Might as well have it do this, when it can sort that stuff out without you having to—to speak it.

Any of it. 

Yeah: it works. 

It's intimate. Not like that modified rig Ryder has, the one he sketched out for you in confessional tones—but it sure is something. 

Here it is: 

A voice to fill the silence. It filled Macen's head once. 

It carries him with it into yours.


End file.
